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December 02, 2011

Please provide a brief introduction about yourself and tell us what you do...I’m the author of three books about digital culture, including one on games, and also do a lot of speaking, consulting and design around game and digital experiences. Perhaps my greatest interest is in how and why people use digital technologies, and what it means to improve their experience.

What is exciting about the gaming space right now? I’m most excited by the fact that games are breaking out of the specialist mold of being something for “gamers” and becoming something for absolutely everyone, of all ages and aptitudes. This is overwhelmingly due to the spread of mobile and tablet devices, and social networks. In the last few years, digital play has become a part of hundreds of millions of people’s lives in a way that is genuinely open and accessible, and I think this is changing what it means to create a game, or indeed any kind of fun, sociable digital experience.

What are the interesting ways that you’re seeing games being used? Education, problem solving, skill building, health etc? Education is always the most exciting thing for me: good games are engines for learning, and I’ve seen them starting to be used in schools in the UK and elsewhere to engage pupils who it can be incredibly hard to reach through conventional educational approaches. Then there is the use of games in professional settings — from medicine to the military — to train people up for scenarios that are simply too serious to be done for real. And finally there’s using them to learn about ourselves, from economic behavior to thinking about how we behave towards each other in any kind of complex, task-oriented setting. These are young fields, but ones with immense potential.

What’s your feeling on the use of social games? What is their ability to create collaboration? When you have people playing together, they are fully themselves in a way that you don’t get in almost any other area: you get the whole person, willingly collaborating on a task with others, and alongside this you can get some wonderfully complex behaviors. From things like Guilds in massively multiplayer online games, I think we can learn a lot about what it means to collaborate with other people on a task through digital media; perhaps more importantly, I also think that playing with others like this can build interpersonal bonds, and help us experiment with ideas about how we work best in teams, and what it means to work effectively together, both as a leader and as a follower.

What are the compelling motivations for people to play/participate? Games are all about satisfaction, of various complex kinds: you can use the word “fun,” but it doesn’t necessarily get to the root of the deep sense of achievement and mastered obstacles that some games offer. Ultimately, though, all games can be thought of as mechanisms for generating emotional responses – they are their own justification, and if they are well-made, they are intensely satisfying because they offer many layers of emotional satisfaction, from the simple delight of being transported to another world to the rewards of working with others towards a common goal, and gaining skills and achieving mastery. Unlike the world, a good game is fair: you know that you can win, and get credit for your skills. This kind of fairness is a huge advantage that games have over life.

What are your thoughts on the role of sensors, tracking and data? I think we’re going to see a steady integration of some kinds of play into real-world living: games able to respond to where we are, who we are with, what we are doing. But I’m not sure that this is as big a deal as some people make out – because ultimately it asks an awful lot from people, and they may not be willing to share data or information in this way. Data in general is a much more exciting field — because the fact that you can measure absolutely everything that someone does within a game presents you with a staggering opportunity to learn new things about behaviour, or to answer questions of what people like and want very precisely indeed. The kind of calibration you can achieve already, in terms of getting things just right to keep people playing and engaged, is powerful and a little frightening.

What are the big opportunities within the space? What’s the future hold? As I said in the beginning, the biggest opportunities for me are the ones that involve the most people: games not as highly complex experiences, but as casual, mobile, social experiences that tens or hundreds of millions of people can do while they go about their daily lives. Smartphones are fast becoming the world’s most important gaming platform, and I think this is a field that has huge growth in it — while specialist gaming machines, like consoles, have their work cut out in surviving against this competition for attention.

The future, for me, is above all about engineering play experiences to be as pleasurable for ordinary users as possible – Angry Birds is an excellent example of something that stands out because of the emphasis it puts on ease and seamlessness of experience, and because of its universal appeal. Although we mustn’t forget that games are a fertile area for innovation, too. Look at Kinect: digital play is one of those areas in which, if it’s made pleasurable and delightful enough, people are willing to embrace novelty in a way they wouldn’t even consider in most other fields.

This interview was conducted by Timothy Ryan and featured on PSFK in preparation for their upcoming ‘Future of Gaming’ report. Tom Chatfield is a faculty member of The School of Life, and has recently developed our new class ‘How to Thrive in the Digital Age’, which will be running again on the 20 February 2012.

October 27, 2011

I told friends at my primary school that an author had dedicated a book to me. In print. And everything.

This white lie got me in a bit of hot water. “Bring it in and show us then”, they said. “OK.”

Except the book didn’t exist. One fib led to another and I decided to write my own dedication in a way that (I thought) looked like type: For Molly Mackey.

(I wrote it in pencil, because I wasn’t old enough to write in pen.)

The book was Terry Jones’s Fairy Tales, which included a story called‘Brave Molly’, so it made sense to me that it would be dedicated to a real life Molly. I wrote it on the inside page, hoping my friends wouldn’t get to the actual dedication: these stories were written for Sally Jones in the summer of 1978.

I still have the book. And you can see my hand-written ‘dedication’, along with the very faint ‘for’, rubbed out after my super sleuth friends quickly discovered the truth:

It’s a laughable forgery. I think I knew it at the time, but I really, really wanted to have a book dedicated to me. I thought it was the Best. Thing. Ever. That someone could write a book and say, “here, this is for you” blew my mind.

It still does. The first thing I do when I pick up a book – any book – is look at the dedication in the front and the thanks at the back. If I’m in a bookshop, browsing the three-for-two mounds, I don’t read the blurbs. I head straight for the names, the little bit where the author writes in their own voice.

Sometimes they tell you how they’re connected to that name on the first page (for Kate, my mother). Mostly I have to settle for the bare bones. For… but then my brain goes into overdrive (“must be his partner/wife/sister/mum/best friend”). I swiftly make up my own stories about how the name in print is connected to the name on the front cover.

Sometimes authors give you a little more, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Once again to Zelda. In Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, the dedication reads: for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing, next to their four photos, as well as and for Jonathan, my life. You don’t have to be a Nobel prizewinner to know that’s Jonathan Safran Foer. Ahhh. Lovely! Two authors! Together! In love!

All the time I search for scraps of information. Something, anything, about the author. Why? I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that I spend a lot of time with an author when I read their books. I hear their voice. I’m in their head, and they’re in mine. Even if it’s outlandish fiction, their book becomes like a familiar friend. And as the book goes on I want to know more. So much so that I feel a bit of disorientated when I pick up a book written by someone else. And although it’s exciting to read a new book, I have to get to know the writer’s little wordy eccentricities and foibles all over again. And each new dedication gives me a teeny tiny glimpse into their real life.

And then there are the acknowledgements. Tucked away at the back, it’s often where you can find out where the author put pen to paper (thanks to such-and-such-research centre, writers’ retreat or Starbucks), who helped them get their facts straight, who edited their book and who they relied on to look after the kids while they wrote it. I love these sneak peeks into an author’s real life. There are books I’m just not interested in reading, but I’ll always have a look at their acknowledgements. Just a few little words, but they’re a story in themselves – admittedly one that’s often made up by me.

Three years after my playground dedication debacle, I finally got what I’d boasted about. My mum’s friend was writing a book and her illustrator needed some children to photograph to help her draw the pictures. If by any (small) chance you have a copy of Rose Impey’s Scare Yourself to Sleep, you’ll see it’s For Tom, Molly and Alice (me, my brother and my best friend). Too late to prove my point to the five-year-olds, but a fib come true all the same.

We All Need Words dedicate this blog post to the people who’ve come to our Words for Life class at The School of Life (there’s another one on 3rd December).

October 13, 2011

In recent years our concern for smell has become heightened – helped by smoking bans, and air pollution. It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve also seen an increasing obsession with managing our own personal impressions, through the use of deodorants, air fresheners, perfumes, car fragrances, clothes sprays, body creams and even flavoured breath mints.

Once considered to be the least important sense, 2004 Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, conclusively proved the power of smell. Since then, products, conversations and aroma possibilities have abounded. But, despite our ability to recall over 10,000 smells, we still have an incredibly stunted vernacular to describe smells without naming the object or cause of the aroma. There is also no agreement, between individual or master perfumers, about what smells good and what doesn’t. Our olfactory values are social, cultural, gender specific, age related and genetically determined.

From the 1980s onwards, we’ve known that crucial factors in purchase decision-making were based upon the emotional and sentimental state. This makes smell a hugely powerful tool for retailers, as this is exactly where smell and memory come into their own. Olfaction is passive, and the experience of odour types can be pervasive and subtle, working at a very different level of cognition. It’s not surprising that brands are increasingly waking up to their powers.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff may seem like something from a time gone by, but the use of scent is the biggest developing trend in sensory marketing and branding today. Fragrance logos which are unique to a product or company are increasingly being used. Diffused when the brand and/or product is present, the limbic part of the brain responds to sensory clues and hard-wires the response in the body-memory.

Odor-styling looks set to diversify and possibly to replace a large percentage of current advertising techniques which are not engaged on a sensory level. Since the advent of digital technologies and cyber worlds, odour biometrics and artificial fragrances are being developed and explored to their full potential.

So, take a deep breath, because you are about to get a scents of things to come. The world of ‘aromanomics’ is about to infiltrate our world; and what is more, we may never know it!

Dr Morgaine Gaye is a Food Futurologist - academic, consultant and presenter, who looks at food and eating from a social, cultural, economic, trend, branding and geo-political perspective. She will be part of the team leading 'A Day of Good Scents' on November 26. Click here for more details.

September 02, 2011

This week, Week 4 of my journey of creative rediscovery, was pretty dramatic as far as I'm concerned. First and foremost it was Reading Deprivation week. Cameron comments, pretty astutely, that "For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction", and argues that instead of investigating your own feelings or ideas, it seems easier/preferable, to explore those of other people.

I think she has a point. I know only too well how much I default to other people's ideas, instead of recognising that my own view-point could be valuable and/or interesting. The commitment of deciding what it is that YOU think, instead of reading about what someone else thinks, is incredibly challenging.

Nonetheless, as much as I wholeheartedly agreed with the premise of no-reading week, the reality was that after at least a year of consideration, I had finally ordered a Kindle e-reader, and of course, it arrived this week. I don't think I have ever left something new in it's packaging for that long. This was an exercise in self-restraint on multiple levels!

This week was also the week that I experienced a Kriya... I think. Cameron uses the Sanskrit word to describe what is basically a physiological melt-down, triggered by one or more emotional events. In all honesty, I can't say for certain that this was what happened to me, but given that she discusses the idea in this week's chapter, and I'm honing in on synchronous events at the moment, I think it's reasonable to make the connection.

Essentially, after weeks of waiting, weeks of conversations, brainstorming, and general chatter, all kinds of things started becoming concrete, and good things started coming my way. I won an exciting new strategy project. I was lined up for a couple more. I connected with, and impressed, people who I had only ever read about in magazines… and then I crashed and burned. First migraine ever, three days of feeling run-down and unwell, and no real explanation other than "Lizzie, you're exhausted!". So I've called it my Kriya, and I hope it's out of my system!

Much of this week's chapter has explored the connection and relevance of writing Morning Pages - those three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing (that this week have suffered considerably because I felt so horrible) - and the behavioural and emotional changes that may have started to appear as a result. Cameron suggests that you might have stronger preferences about what you do and don't like. Or find the urge to clean, and get rid of things that don't work for you anymore. I can definitely check that box. Two bags of old clothes are currently waiting to go to the charity shop.

Week 5 is all about opening yourself up to new possibilities, and challenging yourself with what the pay-off actually is, if you choose to stay stuck.

To avoid this, I challenge you with one of the Week 4 tasks:

List five hobbies that sound fun

List five skills that would be fun to have

List five things that you used to enjoy doing

List five silly things that you would like to try once

(Let’s just say that now I have “DJ a party” and “Learn to make a proper Flat White” on my to-do list!)

August 23, 2011

What could be more ordinary than a stretch of public pavement? When did you last stand and watch a stretch of public pavement or a street corner?

If you take the time you will see that the street can be a stage for the most amazing dramas, you will see that comedies, tragedies and romances unfold in full public view and that the street is a theatre. This is the world of the Street Photographer where the ordinary and everyday is very often more remarkable than any imagined fiction.

Working with small quiet cameras Street Photographers hover, follow and stake out the actors of this pedestrian play. Waiting with a rectangle and a shutter button to edit the chaos and flux into something beautiful, poignant and ordered that can be held up and studied forever.

I think of Street Photography as a revelatory act because through the act of photography and in particular photographing the small details of life, the world we live in is revealed to us. The pictures provide a rare mirror in which to see our own society, working, earning, shopping, spending, texting, eating lunch out of a plastic triangle.

I have had a lot of faith in this way of working, even when it was not as popular as it is today. I find these street pictures to be more relevant than the images from any other photographic strategy. They appear simple but I find them harder to make than any of the big commercial or editorial projects I work on. Street Photography is the greatest challenge in photography, there is no equipment to hide behind and no crew to assist you, but it is also the most satisfying experience to pluck a moment of wonder from nowhere.

Nick Turpinis one of London's most acclaimed street photographers and will be leading our weekend of Photographing London on the 10& 11 September. Although now sold out, new dates will be announced shortly.

August 09, 2011

Last week, a friend told me that she'd started working her way through a book called "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. She suggested I might want to take a look at it as well, talking as we were, about the stressful subject of career paths and prospects.

Our stories shared much in common; we both went to the same fiercely academic independent girls' school in North London, we both went on to study Theology at Cambridge, and we both continue to struggle with the fact that our mutual rejection of careers in Investment Banking, Law, Management Consultancy and Medicine, has left us in a pretty confusing place.

Between us we'd lived in the US, Zambia, New Zealand, India and the UK, gaining experience in Brand Strategy, Cooking, Psychotherapy and Digital Development. We both acknowledge that it’s not a bad CV, and yet we both remain concerned about what it is exactly that we do at the moment, and what exactly it is that we want to do in the future. Enter The Artist's Way.

It's not the kind of book that I'm naturally drawn to, because it's written with a continuous spiritual undertone, something I find quite off-putting and difficult to stomach. (And yes, I did say that I studied Theology, but that was from an entirely academic rather than a personal perspective). As a result, my eyebrows rose numerous times, on reading the book's first few chapters, confirming my position as a "cynical reader".

Nevertheless, The Artist's Way does have some solid psychological principles behind it, and author Julia Cameron, is herself a success as an international screenwriter and author. That it hasn't been written by a "Wellness Guru" or "Life Coach", I find reassuring.

The basic idea is that over a twelve-week period, you develop the confidence and the discipline, to pursue whatever creative activity you choose. Consequently, much of the book is about building self-esteem, through perfectly sensible exercises, and focuses on getting you past the "I don't feel like painting/writing/singing/designing today" excuse.

The first step is "Morning Pages", which comprises three continuous pages of writing, done first thing in the morning, falling somewhere between a stream of consciousness and a journal entry. In essence it's about becoming comfortable with producing large amounts of rough-and-ready content that you are not allowed to re-read, edit, or polish in any way. For "Type-A" students such as myself, the idea of putting pen (and yes it has to be pen, no computer typing for Morning Pages), to paper, without knowing that the result will be perfect, is a real challenge. The willingness to iterate, to acknowledge that anything is better than nothing, and the recognition that being a good writer-in-your-head is not actually being a writer at all, is fundamental to the creative process, and a substantial hurdle to clear.

But I think I'm off to a good start. I have twelve pages of handwriting to show for my efforts, and I decided on Saturday to start a Tumblr blog of interesting things that inspire, amuse or pique my curiosity in some way, as a public record of my journey with the book.

Next week is all about "Self Definition" and learning to assert yourself as a Creative without feeling like a fraud, which all seems pretty close to home… I'll keep you posted!

Lizzie Shupak is a Digital and Brand Strategist. She is also one half of the international social experience, Wok+Wine. She is currently on a journey of creative discovery, which may or may not affect her biography, in the weeks and months ahead.

August 02, 2011

Bam! Just like that, the summer holidays are upon us. Six loooong weeks of paddling pools or rainy days on rotation. Story time crops up more often in the summer nine-to-five, so which picture books are at the top of your list?

Dear Audio Book (as your kids see you),

Yours is a common ailment. Luckily, We All Need Words are obsessed with kids’ books and they’ve rustled up this picture-book prescription just for you. The dosage? Again. And again.

TO ANSWER LITTLE ONES' BIG QUESTIONS:

The Lost Thing

“So you want to hear a story?” It’s just an ordinary day in suburbia when the little boy finds the lost thing. Where did it come from? Where will it go? What does it mean to belong? What’s happiness, anyway? This story mixes the surreal and the everyday to ask - not answer - some of life’s big questions. The answers are up to you…by Shaun Tan

The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Laura Carlin “Where did he come from? Nobody knows.” This is a new version of Ted Hughes’ classic with brilliant illustrations. It tackles belonging (again), fear, war and, eventually, peace. Good to give Dr Who fans their first taste of science fiction.

TO REMEMDY FEARS:

Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears by Emily GravettWhatever your children are afraid of, Little Mouse can top it. Sciaphobia (fear of shadows), ablutophobia (fear of bathing) and even panophobia (fear of everything), he’s one fretful, scaredy-mouse. Part story, part therapy (“everyone is scared of something”) and part diary for kids to write, doodle and record the things that scare them.

The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark by Jill Tomlinson“I don’t want to be a night bird…I want to be a day bird.” Plop is a little owl who hates the dark. Over seven chapters he learns that the dark is exciting, (you can’t have fireworks without it), wonderful, beautiful and kind. An oldie (it was first published in 1968), but a goodie. Especially for kids who insist you leave the light on.

TO BREAK THE HABITS OF A LITTLE LIFETIME:

The Boy Who Hated Toothbrushes by Zehra HicksFirst off, we should point out that we know this author and we wrote the biog on her website… Billy will do anything to get out of cleaning his teeth. Until the horrified tooth fairy sends him a toothsparkler and things get interesting (and his teeth get cleaner). Good for adding a bit of magic to the daily toothbrush tussle.

The World Champion of Staying Awake by Sean Taylor, illustrated by Jimmy LiaoStella’s toys are wiiiiiide awake. So she invents adventures to cure their insomnia (and fingers crossed, insomnia everywhere). A story where kids step into their parents’ shoes – you never know, it might prompt some empathy.

TO BRING BRECHT TO BABIES:

Brecht demolished that fourth wall, and these books have a go too. Ok, we exaggerate. But these stories play with the idea of what a book is.

Limelight Larry by Leigh HodgkinsonMeet Larry, a peacock with more attitude than most. He wants to be the star of these empty pages, but other animals keep appearing to spoil his fun. A cautionary tale for any prima donnas in the making…

There Are No Cats In This Book by Viviane Schwarz Tiny, Moonpie and André are three cats who are desperate to get out of this book to see the world. They push, they jump and they ask for your help. Perfect with its sister book, There Are Cats in This Book (they’re very friendly and they want to play).

TO GET UP TO SPEED WITH WHERE BOOKS ARE GOING NEXT:

If your kids are kissing goodbye to a good old-fashioned book in favour of the computer, fear not. Here’s a book that’s an app, and one that most definitely isn’t.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by Moonbot StudiosAn app that lets you play the piano, flick pages, change the colour of the sky, read books-within-books and screams: PLEASE TOUCH to small hands… Created by a designer who used to work at Pixar, this ‘book’ will get kids used to the idea of interactive tales in a jiffy.

It’s A Book! by Lane SmithIt doesn’t scroll. It doesn’t have a plug. It doesn’t need a password. IT’S A BOOK, silly. A media-savvy donkey questions an old-school monkey about the relic that is the book. (We have a sneaky feeling that this book is actually best for parents who are surgically attached to their Blackberry.)

We All Need Words run the Words For Life weekend workshop at The School of Life and children’s books crop up in one of their lessons. Join them next term, in October or December. Click here for further details.

June 28, 2010

I love the idea that the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet , the ‘aleph’, is unvoiced. To use it you have to go beyond what you see. An entire language operates without this first letter’s presence being heard – and there’s a great wisdom there.

The second of the ten commandments, the one about no false idols, is very much like the quiet aleph. Focus on an idol, and you have responsibilities to it. It keeps you worshipping money, or your career, or desperate passion. But in all the time you spend bowing to your idols and nourishing them, you have very little left over for anything else.

The aleph is different, as is the second commandment. The aleph can’t be worshipped, for it’s not really there. It’s just a sign of something else. When idols are treated like that, it’s impossible to waste time on them. Instead, there’s no alternative but to turn to the real world beyond them. That’s the ultimate equation for life.

For then, unburdened, you can enter what’s waiting there.

David Bodanis is a futurist, historian, scientist, business advisor and prize-winning author. He will be taking a Sunday Sermon on The Ten Commandments on 11 July. To book your place please click here.

June 18, 2010

As football fever envelops the planet, with all eyes turned towards South Africa, I want you to imagine a different World Cup. Each country sends their national team as usual, but then all the players are pooled together and divided into teams based on their astrological star sign. So Virgos play Leos, and Aquarians are pitted against Aries, with each team having players from a mix of countries. Who would win overall? Perhaps the power of Taurus, the bull, would be no match for the sharp sting of Scorpio. We might imagine other World Cups, where teams are based on shoe size – the clodhopping size elevens against the nimble-toed eights – or maybe the favourite colour of each player.

If this sounds ridiculous, it is no more absurd than dividing teams on the basis of something as arbitrary as the nationality of the players. This strange practice involves determining team members by where they happen to have been born on a particular land mass, which citizenship document they have managed to get hold of, and where the national frontier is at the time of play.

We should remember that nation-states are historical inventions, mainly emerging since the eighteenth century. Only one hundred and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as Germany or Italy; these states were an agglomeration of principalities. Up until World War One, Europe was dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose frontiers enclosed Slovenia and Slovakia, both of which countries are now playing in South Africa. Serbia would not be battling for supremacy in Group D if had not been for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The artificiality goes further, in the sense that every country has relied on a barrage of invented traditions and other propaganda devices to generate its national identity. The Scots – who failed to qualify for South Africa – take pride in their apparently ancient Highland dress, but according to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the wearing of ‘traditional’ kilts and tartans was an invention of the mid-eighteenth century, partly as a protest against the Union with England. The English are so proud of their red-on-white St George’s Cross, which I see fluttering out of windows and tied to car aerials in the town where I live. But few people realise that St George himself was born in Palestine in the third century, and that the flag was already in use in the fifth century by the Georgian King Vakhtang Gorgasali. Children in the United States have national pride injected into them in school every morning when they swear allegiance to the country’s flag. No community is more deeply imagined than the nation-state.

None of this would really matter if nations were innocent actors on the world stage, but we know that this is not the case. There have been no major wars between armies representing different signs of the zodiac. When it comes to warfare in the past century, nationalism reigns as the supreme culprit. From the two world wars to the conflicts in Yugoslavia and the ethnic violence that flared up this week in Kyrgyzstan, nationalism has been one of the most destructive forces in modern human affairs.

How does this all relate to football? In some ways football tournaments like the World Cup – and sport more generally – can encourage a healthy form of nationalism that forges unity in countries with significant social divides. Brazil may be plagued by horrendous wealth inequality and racism, but its disparate citizens rally together to support their national team. South Africa itself found that holding the Rugby World Cup in 1995 helped create a unified national consciousness and heal the wounds of apartheid, generating empathy between black and white.

But football also plays a role of legitimising and exacerbating divisions between nations. This is not simply visible in the extreme form of hooliganism, but in the more everyday way that people generally support their national team, rather than those of rival nations. Football, like national flags, is part of the ideology that generates the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which ultimately cause so much violent conflict and human suffering. As the sociologist Richard Sennett has written, ‘we’ is a dangerous pronoun, since it necessarily involves the ideas both of inclusion and exclusion. Shouting for your own team also means not shouting for the opposition.

I can appreciate that football is much more about skill and beauty than about creating dangerous forms of nationalism. Football also has the capacity to replace violence with a more gentle ‘war by other means’ – kicking a ball around on some grass. But nationalism has a history of being a dark force, and we should make our best efforts to erode its power and presence. So if you are about to watch your national team play in South Africa, at least consider giving your support to the opposition. In the end, however, we would be much better off with a World Cup that was based on star signs rather than nation-states.

Roman Krznaric is a writer and teacher on creative thinking about the art of living and social change. His new book, Empathy, will be published by Acumen later this year. He is also the author of The First Beautiful Game, and Work and the Art of Living.

December 28, 2009

Some out-of-print books of advice and information have been abandoned for good reason – perhaps for their out-dated data, awful social prejudice or even dangerous ideas. Yet many are worth picking up again, not least because reflecting on past follies prompts us to confront our own. There’s also the chance we’ll find a bright idea languishing even in the thickest thickets of historical hubris. And, of course, neglected books may still be full of delight and inspiration. With that in mind, here is a selection of four ideas from the advice lore of the past. Some seem familiar, some novel, some almost totally disguised by daftness. But, for me at least, each contains some small glimmer or bright gleam of wisdom.

INVITE A FRIEND ON A JAUNT

Do you feel you’ve been remiss in meeting up with a friend lately? There’s little better than inviting a friend on a jaunt to brighten a grey January day. What’s more, if you’ve a fondness for pen and ink, you might indulge in the satisfaction of creating something by hand and resurrecting the charming art of invitation by letter. With any luck you’ll be rewarded by something like this model response from a guide to correspondence:

Dear Louie,

The idea is perfectly delightful. You know how much I have looked forward to the outing, but I really had begun to think that it would never come to anything. It would be great fun to lunch together at the Popular Café. Be sure you keep a good look out for me as I am so short-sighted. I shall wait in the hall. What an afternoon we shall have!

Yours always affectionately,

Mary.

(The Complete Letter Writer by Arnold Villiers, London, c. 1942).

RELAX BODY AND MIND

The benefits of holistic exercise on both body and mind are manifold. But have you no truck with Yoga? Does Pilates appal you? Do you seek an alternative for which you don’t have to remove your heels? Then try Swinging! This gentle exercise claims not only to relax ‘both mind and body simultaneously’ but also – no doubt to the delight of Mary the letter-writer – to relieve eyestrain. There’s not the space to give details here, except to note that you should take your glasses off and close your eyes for periods. Also:

Swinging [fig. 4] should be done before a window and it will be noticed that as you sway, the window seems to move the opposite way to yourself. This opposite movement of objects directly in the foreground should be noticed and encouraged.

(Better Sight Without Glasses by Harry Benjamin, MD, London, 1967).

PLAY GAMES

If you’ve enjoyed entertaining the neighbours by swaying back and forth in your window, it’s a cheerfully small step to invite them round to play games. In our era of ubiquitous glowing screens and the relentless drive for productivity, it’s often hard to recall the vital importance of making our own fun, finding time to laugh and play together, and revelling in the truly daft just for the sake of it. So, in celebration of simple folly, here’s a game to abandon your dignity to:

Arrange a line on the floor – a chalk line or a tape pinned down. Get the players to walk along the line, each foot just in front of the other and on the line. Whilst doing this they must look through a pair of opera glasses turned the wrong way round. This makes the players lift up their legs in a most laughable manner.

(The Co-operative Wholesale Society Book of Party Games, Manchester, c. 1930).

LOVE THE COLDEST MONTH

And finally, when the parties are over, when frivolity grates, when all seems dark and cold, perhaps it’s time to take pleasure in stillness and silence, and find beauty in nature even in the dead of winter. In this light, two naturalists teach us to read the weather and welcome the frost:

When the sun goes down like a molten ball, its edge cut clean, as if it were bound by a metal rim, we know that a frost is falling. By morning every tree will be hung with a silver broidery, as fine and delicate a foliage as spring itself can offer.

It is a delight to watch the growing of frost. There is no better place for seeing the crystals form than in the corner seat of a railway carriage when frost is bearing. Your breath is written in letters on the window-pane almost as you breathe it.(The English Year: Autumn and Winter by W. Beach Thomas and A.K. Collett, London, 1913).